Editor's Note

This special issue goes to press in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Confronted with a global health, social, and economic crisis unprecedented in our lifetime, we are made painfully aware of the tight interconnections of the Anthropocene and reminded of the need to always consider nature, medicine, data, and economics in conjunction with history, politics, affect, and ethics. As we face the consequences of decades of neoliberal policies and practices exacerbating the crisis, the pandemic is also bringing new meanings to borders, mobility, and distance and challenging us to ask new and difficult questions about nations, globalism, and civic life. While we never imagined that we would be living in such a scenario when we began working on this special issue, it has turned to be eerily apropos for our time.

The three guest editors—Natasha Zaretsky, Michael Ziser, and Julie Sze—have compiled this brilliant and forceful collection on energy, bringing together studies of sciences, histories, humanities, and policy and drawing from archives and methods of American and cultural studies. The individual essays and the issue as a whole interrogate "power" in its myriad formations and gather multiple forms of knowledge in an original interdisciplinary conversation. Even as the forbiddingly technical nature of the science of energy has often deterred many scholars in the humanities and social sciences, the rapidly growing crisis of climate change and struggles such as #NoDAPL movements remind us that we have no luxury of shying away from the issues of energy and power.

The guest editors' introduction brilliantly outlines the trajectories of the sciences and humanities that animate energy studies, its intersections with American studies, and the stakes of such inquiries. The eleven essays featured in the issue make bold interventions in our understanding of energy in dialogue with scholarship in such areas as settler colonialism, indigenous studies, labor and racial capitalism, nationalism and security state, petroculture, media studies, and gender studies. The editors and the editorial board are particularly thrilled that many of these exciting essays are the work of young scholars who are pushing the boundaries of disciplinary thinking and leading the field in new directions. We have learned tremendously from them. On behalf of the Board of Managing Editors, I thank the authors for the energies they bring to the journal and the field, and especially to the three guest editors for their audacity in taking on this project.